I’m at the end of my career and got lucky to share your interests at the beginning of a specialist boom

in your place i’d focus on delivering big wins for end-users via multiple roles ; i personally believe the days of being a specialist in one type of stack (ex: “i’m a ui developer”) are over , in this next stage we’ll say “i build products for young people looking for educational opportunities “ ; ie you’ll beed to cut across use-cases and disciplines in a way that was atypical just a few years ago

My honest take is forget that burning interest in programming, it likely won't matter that much in a few years. There may be a need for technically strong people who understand whatever the domain the company works on well I say focus on that. Knowing all kinds of deep python/c++ trivia is a decaying skill imo.

Depends on whether you leverage that interest to motivate you to sharpen your skills so that you're better at your job than your peers. If you're interested but don't do anything with that interest, then you are still in the same boat as the uninterested people.

If you're in that 20% that actually has an interest in the work then you'll probably be fine.